Fylk Faust
Appearance Faust was born of bastard stock, though he had been blessed with vigor. He was no light-footed dandy, and was dedicated to a lifetime of survival - he was a brutish beast when compared to those who bore the same finer blood as he. As far as the ranger was concerned, regality and finery were something that belonged solely to the Gods. He was massive, with arms like cannon barrels and fists like balls of steel. His calloused hands topped each limb - wide shoulders, a stock-straight spine that bore ferocity with each step. A pendulous gut hung above his waist, like a bear, holding the core of his strength. He was stocky, with the density of a bull. He'd been given a strong jaw, crowning itself with a bushy beard which denoted age through the greying of its edges. Wiry hairy covered his head, cutting downwards into great sideburns which fed into the mass. A thick mustache protected the top of his maw, dulled in their hue with iron streaks, victims of time. An aged brow hung above his cyclopean gaze, the right eye long-since lost to some cruel spat with a knife. His face seemed to resemble parchment more than skin, denoting a sense of contentment more than it did cruelty. While his stoic nature tended not to donate many emotions, his gleaming eye remained true to his fervor. History SONGS OF SALT & STEEL The Duke was a creature of old ways and drifting days, although the passage of time never dissuaded his endless zeal for adventure. He was born of noble stock, long-since polluted by the strife of politics - lavish ideas that were plagued by degeneracy and the bastards spawned from that corruption. Faust was sired by the very misfortune that hexed his family. His early years were spent in the education expected of his upbringing - the best gold could procure - in the ways of letters and arithmetic, of political intrigue, of sporting with the hawk and hound, horsemanship, and swordplay. When he'd come to the dusk of his adolescence, it was seen fit that he'd be sent out into the world, that he might experience what it had to offer, and was thrust as a fresh-faced recruit into the ranks of the local militia. He'd learned the world was not all fencing and finery - bandits, brigands, and the those who lurked in shadows gave chase on his path; he'd learned a brutal lesson, that Azeroth would not be as kind to him as he had always dreamed it of since being read in the nursery of conquest and valor. His vigor and dutiful strength forged a passion within him that became a catalyst for adventure.. As he continued traversing and further expanding the borders of what was his known-land, he became a stranger in a stranger land, far from home - he sought to forge his own tale of valor, searching for a ruined world devoid of the true civility of his sheltered upbringing. With his dwindling supplies, he'd cast off the shackles of society, finding his own sort of comfort in sand and ruination. While a smaller man may have cowed from the notion, he found an oddly charming sensation when he arrived in the realm of burning flame soot that was the Badlands, a place where, during the day, the sun broiled high in the sky and flames licked the ground, and in the evenings, a pallor fell, bringing a chill felt deep in one's bones once the moon rose in its place. A kiss of the sun starved the world and forced fatal rot in the carcass of those who did not thrive. The night was no better than the day, where the sun’s mischief was punished with a frigid kiss that culled those who could not adapt and overcome. He'd struck a claim in the sulfur and sand. While the world was far from his palm, the oasis of danger he'd created was at the tip of his fingers. The unflinching sun gave his hide a tanned, dusky appearance, as leathery as his armor - swarthy, his hands now calloused and rough like rawhide. There was no decadence here, and as his supplies had begun to run low, he'd fought tooth and nail like a feral beast to survive. A deep want grew in him, that he might not be denied his birthright of land given claimant - desire fueled it, had given him the knowledge to expand influence and flock others to him, but the circumstances of this bitter place where stray farmers grew only rocks and stunted roots paid him a heavy blow. With his singular victory over the wastes through sheer grit, two blaring failures soon came to pass - that both misfortune and misery were predatory abundant and would consume him if they let him. He welcomed them like an old friend, hardening him for the difficult life he'd chosen. The young ranger's trials of self-improvement had concluded, and he sought to return to his homeland, that he might see the dowager Duchess, his mother - the Matriarch of the family. Pleasantries were far-flung, and this new, brutal creature before them was far less desired than before he had left. There had been hopes that he might become a refined explorer, who might do great things and speak of exotic cultures - the prodigal son had instead returned as something barbaric and primal, disillusioned. Their shock at his fierce nature gave him no worries, no qualms with the haughty nobility who had raised him - merely his blood, and naught else. His mind had wandered towards where the roots of survival and self-sufficiency had set place, their tendrils gnawing their way through his thoughts, slung deeper even then as he witnessed silver spoons held up by the patient hands of attendants. Pleasantries were slung aside when tensions rose among the farthest reaches of the kingdom's territories. The known world was soon to be blessed with a cleansing tide of black blood - a vile force that sought only to devour the resources it consumed and reunite a shattered world from its destruction - a dying breath that sighed a miasmic cloud of death, as green as poison, with thrice the lethality - savage orcs, consumed by zealotry, swarmed the human kingdoms. SON OF THE WIND While Faust had cast away the world, he would rejoin the civilized nation of the Lion and bear its glorious banner. The gravity was apparent - the Horde wished to eliminate their way of life with a horrifying display of brutality that incited only hopeless, pathed by broken bodies and blood. The innocent were culled without mercy, and those who had fought for their own freedoms were now slaughtered like common animals. The orcs banded together with their bestial allies, sieging a city that the ranger that had been posted to, one which, too, hung the banners of the Great Lion. The walls would stand, the men would bear their shields and provide a barrier from the senseless violence. Fate sang differently as the city fell to ruination, cleaved asunder by axe and sword, and its people cried for help. In those bloody clashes, Faust became a harbinger of dread, cutting swathes of black-blooded murder down with his sword beside his brothers, those few who remained and found sport in the art of vengeance, working tandem that they might bring down their vicious foe. Despite the combined prowess, a band of brothers alone would become easily overwhelmed - where one orc fell, soon ten seemed to sprout up in his place, hungrier and far more bloodthirsty than the beast before him. A retreat was called from the advance, and the ranger found himself on a ship hastily leaving the sieged port, watching a place he once knew be consumed by the blazing fires of war and ground out beneath the treads of the war machine. As time marched on, he found find hope in the distant glow of its embers. Primal devils cloaked in sickly green skin had broken the foundation of a kingdom, taken its lands, and driven off its inhabitants, but hope still sung in their hearts. The burning embrace pulsed through him with the rapid-fire gunshot beat of his heart, and despair whipped a sort of frenzy in him - new life in the loss, even as the war marched on. The Horde continued its onslaught, consuming all in its path like locusts in a field, fueling the insatiable hunger in him that others, too, felt - vengeance, to band together, refined through new and old hatreds alike. He'd fight the very world if it let him, and the challenges before him were no different than those he had endured when he was a younger man. It was all simple obstacles that he might overcome, build up and around, and with the war he'd found a new purpose in his survival - that he might prove the dowager wrong, that the dreams buried deep in his bones could come true, and that he would easily defend the innocent and slaughter those who sought to sully their own dreams. It wasn't necessary to crack the shell he'd developed over the years, a hardened visage- his actions spoke his worth. Terrible losses and battles pass, skirmishes, encounters where there were culling and pyrrhic victories which stagnated - and yet, he endured, he thrived. He'd lost new-found friends, battle brothers, those he'd come to call kin, but tears were not shed for those who had been summarily gone - tenacious fury replaced them. Like a forge, rage fueled within him, a molten heart beating away at its fetters of bone and flesh. THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING SUN Anyone who bore the banner of the Horde was his enemy; trolls, ogres, and orcs would be destroyed by any and all means he had at his disposal. A failure at the Horde's hands marked a major turn and a push through the storm. Humans, dwarves, and elves alike all held claimancy to some ending they wished to see - and retribution was at long-last had. The Grand Alliance had fought the savagery to their heels. At the end of it all, he had become a veteran - a fighting man, embittered through the cruel nature of combat, a creature that could survive at any front, could face any adversity flung at him. He'd adapted, just as he had in simpler times, where all he had to do was hunt and starve, thirst and scavenge, seeing no days but unending hours. He, and Azeroth alike, could finally breathe. Azeroth could finally breathe as her wounds healed, and he found respite where his service became entwined with those of Stormwind's finest. He'd earned a place among the powerful, with those he had found beside during the long war. He'd found his niche, but it was not forged through birthright - not through blood, no titles from his father - a title he'd been given through his fortitude. A title was something that bore power in the spheres of both the fighting men and duchal duties - a rank in those his blood would have deemed lesser, but one where he, never the less, longed to be. Peace was a fleeting thing, like the passage of Summer into Autumn. The far reaches of the North brought winds tinged with the fetid aroma of death. A new plague, one of the reanimated damned, broke through the Kingdoms that had once been their home, a shattering, unending force which fed on life itself - the Scourge. While there were some kingdoms which simply locked their gates and sealed themselves away, the war against the dead was won by unified force and countless loss - grave, to the very world herself, but a necessary one. Duplicity and theft had found the serpentine steps of the future - these battles were skirmishes in the dark, blind to a beast with obsidian scales that had wormed its way into nobility. It, too, was put down with the ferocity of heroes. A floating citadel comprised of eldritch monstrosities and death were then, too, put down from the grave from which they'd crawled - ancient evils, defeated across the sea, a vicious monster constructed solely of inhuman nature, soon sealed away by champions. Azeroth twisted and turned, and those same heroes pressed on. Every waking moment of the ranger was spent attempting to rebuild a lost world he once knew, a place existing only in his memories. Even as he lay the bricks for a future revival, something primal called to him. He felt no need for the decadence granted in his rank - gold was more a tool for him, than a hobby. He was a creature of unrefined tastes, and Azeroth was a bounty. Rebuilding, guarding the garrisons, and solving the small situations on the fringes of the realm were his priority. His common pastime was the hunt, indulging in extended forrays into the wilds. And still as the sands of time fell, Azeroth became embroiled with a new threat. The portal which had once brought primitive beasts fueled a new assault, demons driven with a desire to massacre and shatter a world they'd rightly come to hate. The remnants of Draenor were virile for repugnant things - the Naga, the Broken, and creatures bred of malevolent intent spewed fourth. Against their combined forces, he continued to hold the linne, slaughtering those who's sole purpose was to destroy that which he'd come to hold dear. Pustules to be lanced with emboldened blades, new-found brothers and sisters surging forth with fervor to cleanse the land of its illness. Another war concluded, where both the Horde and Alliance had defeated the threats to their very ways of life. The past haunted old soldiers, a pestilent tide of ghoulish roars and a thousand disjointed hands swelling the streets of his beloved city. The dead became another axe strike, once more frothing at the mouth, terrible aberrations that tromped the streets. The newly-forged Argents beat back the undeath alongside each champion, the stench of the mindless dead filling every alley and byway. This would not stand, this hint of a world snuffed out by the cold embrace of death itself - and yet, hope still remained, and so he was shipped to Northrend for another war, valiant and unflinching. He'd marched in those frigid winds, a land of bleak snow and desolation. The ice he'd stepped on, itself, betrayed those who daringly traipsed past it, and he was no different from those who had fallen victim to the tunnels beneath the frozen wastes. A new terror came in the form of spider-like beings who lashed out with a hollow fury, shambling with unlife. He wetted his sword in their chitinous armor, gashing at their weak flesh, pooling ichor with each sweeping strike to their joints. The undead were a vile sort, one which sapped the life from those who s till yet breathed, but the landscape itself seemed far hungrier in that regard. Bitter storms cut to the very bone, ice broke off frozen flesh. It was dangerous, and beautiful in its cruelty, a place where underlying corruption reflected on the endless expanses of shimmering snow. Fighting hoards of unsleeping, unfeeling masses was a taxing process, and not all who fought had the luxury of dealing solely with the ghouls and grunts of the undead's forces. While some of the minions were easily hacked away, massive, undulating abominations spewed their bitter bile, an acidic substance which caused terrible infections and necrosis - shock troopers, followed by gargoyles, devils with leathery wings that spat out wrathful balls of horrid energy from the skies. So many patchwork creatures sewn together came in an endless stream, and the living lost only added to the ranks of the damned. In their tide of brutal fighting was a push and pull. He'd become a survivalist through it all, had adapted in the hardest terrains, and the challenge of the North came quicker to the ranger than it did most. He'd share the knowledge he'd gleamed, giving those under his command an edge. He found in the field beside them, to preserve life in those heartless glaciers - he held the wall, he ran supplies, and fought against death even as its cold fingers reached for his heart - but he would be unsnuffed, and that fiery passion continued to blaze within him. A thousand-thousand corpses tried to bury him in a mass grave, and still he dug his way through. The combined efforts of the Alliance, the Argents, and the Horde ended it all - the Lich King and his creations were scattered like funerary ash in the wind. In his long service to the realm, he was soon promoted again. His taste for the soft life were fleeting - he was rockier than his youth. The countless wars had changed him, and each death rocked his very core. He was an old soul, one who took the longer road, one where each drop of blood was a ripple in the pool of those shed. The concept of loss became far more common and frequent, and Azeroth was always under some form of attack - yet, he couldn't deny that peace, itself, was not uncommon - his people's banner still were raised high, and new allies established themselves. Conflicts came and went as each blistering threat heated itself in the dark. Those fires carved a new pathway - the shattering of the Cataclysm, the misty mountains of Pandaria, the boiling Legion, all different dangers with a common thread - each held zealotry and righteousness in their own mind, justified by a greater evil. And each threat was crushed beneath the boot of Good. From those wars, each sliver of suffering forged a new iron. The mind of a soldier was his deadliest weapon, and even yet, a battered psyche would only endure so much before it broke. Like Atlas, the very weight of the world was in the countless corpses, and he'd seen thousands in his time. He'd age in his battles like a fine wine, refined to take on the very worst flung at him. And even still, the denizens of a unified Azeroth clawed at each other's tender throats. "Justice" became his idealization - a front on which he wound destroy the cruel, undo the evil. Even now, the Horde was smote with a cruel dictatorship under the Banshee Queen - war forges strength, and weakens. He knew his duty to his people, to which he'd fight to the very end. Personality How he acts. Relationships Elaborate on familial, professional, and friendly relationships here. Gallery Include any images here. Category:Human Category:Stormwind Peerage Category:Politicians